Two other publications I can recommend are "Where There is No Doctor" and "Where There is No Dentist" by the Hesperian Foundation ($17 a pop for a paperback, but also available online for free). They pay less attention to contemporary meds or nuanced emergency procedures, and spend more time on holistic, community-oriented care for practitioners in some of the most impoverished regions of the world. This probably makes the publications worthwhile for hardcore preppers who worry about widespread, long-term cataclysms.
This option requires the least amount of work and time investment. You can stock up on these regular sized cans on each trip to the grocery store for one of the easiest ways to build a stocked pantry. Grocery cans range in size from 12 ounce cans to #2.5 cans, so you have different portion sizes to choose from. There is a big variety, they are widely available, and they are cheap- so they naturally are a good choice for those looking to begin prepping. Canned meats, vegetables, and fruits are all great building blocks for a food stash. Check the labels for calories and nutritional value, and try to get high calorie cans as well as balanced variety of nutritional values. Some cans label multiple servings inside the same can, so you may need to do a little math to get the total values. Ready-to-eat canned foods are good to have around for small disasters since they are less of a hassle to prepare. You can concentrate on more important matters if you just heat and pop open a can of soup or chili.

158. Baofeng handheld – If you’re looking for a handheld HAM radio, Baofeng delivers. FCC certified if you want to go HAM without a huge setup this 2 pack handheld is the right way to start. Before you buy a radio and start broadcasting you need to get familiar with the laws and the FCC and consider getting a Technicians license to be able to broadcast legally. You can ‘receive’ with no license, but to broadcast you need to be certified.

Only buy preps that you use on a regular basis. I have heard of people throwing away their old out-dated food storage because they can’t give it away to the food bank since it has expired. There is a psychological factor if it looks old and not as appetizing as the new stuff then most of us won’t eat it. I have a friend that was diagnosed with a terminal illness. After the diagnosis, she was very particular about what she would put in her body. All expired foods were given away and who can blame her. Rotating your short-term food storage and not buying extras of the things you don’t eat regularly can keep you from wasting money.
You can store all sorts of foods in a food grade bucket. Buckets also double as great survival kit items for random uses. Be aware if you use you food grade bucket to hold chemical or anything that could hurt the integrity of the bucket, that you shouldn’t reuse it for food again. While you can probably find good options locally for cheaper, food grade buckets are available online:

Shields said that the company noticed an uptick in sales in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, and, again last year, amid fears of nuclear escalation with North Korea. Like Wise Company's former CEO Aaron Jackson, whom Bloomberg previously dubbed “America’s Survival Food King,” Shields said he likes to think of Wise’s products as “an insurance policy.”

For folks interested in getting a nice, compact Geiger counter, Radex One ($120) is pretty hard to beat; it is tiny, inexpensive, and can be hooked up to a PC to continuously monitor the environment (and send e-mail or SMS alerts). The one caveat is that similarly to many other low-cost units, this device maxes out at 1 mSv/h - enough to know that something is very wrong, but not enough to tell if you're going to receive a life-threatening dose in an hour or somewhere within the next six months. In other words, some of the more hardcore preppers may want to invest in a more capable unit, such as ADM-300 (which goes all the way to 100 Sv/h) or RAD-60R (3 Sv/h). Decommissioned military and civilian devices in excellent working condition can be found on eBay for around $200.
Now, there are some dangers to life and limb that we simply can't predict or prevent: the occasional falling piano, the murderous roommate, the untimely stroke. Then there are the risks we take willingly, accepting the inherent and unavoidable trade-offs of our hobbies or jobs: the possibility of being snatched by a giant squid while snorkeling off the coast of California, or the near-certainty of lung fibrosis from toiling in a sugar mine. These are the things we can't or don't want to give up - and that's perfectly fine.
Water is truly the staff of life, without it, you will die in just a few days. Assume that for whatever reason, your taps won’t work – there is no water coming into your home. What else do you have? Do you have bottled water somewhere? Did you know there is about 50 gallons of water stored in your water heater? There’s also a few gallons in the tank of your toilet! If you have an outside water source – such as a lake, creek or storm drain – do you have a way to filter it? Your first goal with water should be to be able to provide your family with 2 weeks worth of water and a way to continue filtering found water after that. Here is a great place to start learning about water.

Don't hit the gym. Hold off with intense workouts at least until you are close to your target weight. Daily exercise schedules are hard to keep for more than a couple weeks, especially if you lead a busy life; on top of that, a drastic increase in physical activity can trigger cravings or upend your nutritional needs. If you are itching to burn some extra fat, incorporate less punishing activities into your daily routine - say, walking or leisurely biking to work.

Do people buy them? Sure they do. Sales aren't the goal, though. The idea here is to induct people into a lifestyle, because these same people sell things like wilderness survival courses, subscriptions to survival food delivery services, tools and weapons, and vitamins. Prepping is big business, with Yahoo! Finance reporting that as many as 3.7 million Americans identified themselves as "preppers" in 2013, fueling demand for a multi-billion dollar industry.
For folks interested in getting a nice, compact Geiger counter, Radex One ($120) is pretty hard to beat; it is tiny, inexpensive, and can be hooked up to a PC to continuously monitor the environment (and send e-mail or SMS alerts). The one caveat is that similarly to many other low-cost units, this device maxes out at 1 mSv/h - enough to know that something is very wrong, but not enough to tell if you're going to receive a life-threatening dose in an hour or somewhere within the next six months. In other words, some of the more hardcore preppers may want to invest in a more capable unit, such as ADM-300 (which goes all the way to 100 Sv/h) or RAD-60R (3 Sv/h). Decommissioned military and civilian devices in excellent working condition can be found on eBay for around $200.
If a crisis persists for a long enough period of time, it is very difficult to have an extended comprehensive food stock pile. Having the ability to grow vegetables is a great supplement to your stored foods. Be sure to have varieties that do well in your area, in your soil, and that you know how to grow. Have seeds for medicinal herbs and flavorful spices as well.
It turns out that when you're down to your last moldy hunk of bread and giardia-laced mud puddle, letting it all melt away in a cloud of smoke for a few precious moments can mean the difference between giving up and giving the rat (eating) race another go. If history has anything to say, it's more common than you think for people to happily give up MREs and gunlord harems in return for hastening their ends with carcinogens wrapped up in tidy paper packages. In traumatic situations like war, cancer sticks are often valued more highly than food. Even in the current (more or less) pre-apocalyptic global economy, cigarettes are one of the stable forms of currency.
Some people carry both, but most choose one or the other. Multi-tools are nice for everyday utility like opening a bottle or fixing a screw on your sunglasses. There are tons of great options from popular brands like Leatherman and Gerber. But as in most things, the 80-20 rule applies here, and you’ll find that you won’t use most of the features in the extra-gadgety options and should avoid the unnecessary weight.
As discussed earlier in this guide, we face surprisingly high lifetime odds of becoming victims of burglary, assault, or other major crime. To deal with this danger, the guide promotes a handful of passive risk avoidance and loss minimization strategies, with the bulk of this advice found in section 3.5. But it would be dishonest to claim that such methods will always shield us from harm - so in this chapter, let's have a look at some of the tools that serve as the last line of defense when all other approaches fail.
If you must take regular medications for a medical condition, you’ll likely want to pack an extra set in your survival kit. You’ll need to discuss the issue with your doctor if you require prescription medications, but don’t forget about over-the-counter medications you may need too. For example, if you often suffer from heartburn, you’ll likely want to add some antacids to your survival kit. Similarly, if you have allergies, you’ll want to pack extra antihistamines, and you may even want to include an EpiPen if an anaphylactic shock is possible.
Individual pouches: For this use-case, we prefer packages where one pack equals one meal or serving. Pouches are easier to store, can often be used to cook the meal without any other utensils, are more portable, don’t need a can opener, can be traded, and so on. No. 10 cans, which are like big coffee cans, are great for staple ingredients like flour or corn.
We get that creature comforts will be ever more important as the things that used to make us happy slowly break and crumble around us. But do you really want to put a ton of effort into opening a bakery when everything is going to shit? And we hate to be the bearers of bad news, but no amount of odor elimination is going to stop the uncivilized world from smelling really, really bad.

Once you get going, it will be easy to lose track of what you already have. The best way to overcome the state of confusion you will experience six months down the road is to start keeping track of your stored items now – from the beginning. Use a spiral notebook, a computer spreadsheet, or a clipboard and a pad of paper. Update your inventory with the item and date of purchase as it goes into storage and of course, mark it off as it rotates out.

Spark Naturals Essential Oils: My first line of defense for minor ailments and illness is essential oils.A good option to start with is the “Health and Wellness” kit that comes packaged in a tin and includes a brochure with suggested uses for each of the oils. As kits, these oils are already discounted but as an added bonus, you get an additional 10% off with discount code BACKDOORSURVIVAL at checkout.
Most break-ins are purely opportunistic: thieves are in and out within five minutes, quickly rummaging through all the places where people usually keep valuable stuff. You can bank on them going through every nook and cranny of your bedroom, looking under the mattress, peeking into every drawer - and grabbing everything that looks shiny and is easy to lift. Their usual targets include phones, cameras, tablets, laptops, jewelry, firearms, loose cash, checkbooks, credit cards, and prescription meds. Vital documents that may be useful for identity theft or benefits fraud, such as drivers licenses, passports, and SSN cards, are also a fair game.

If you have a daytime job or go to school, there is a good chance that the event you are preparing for could unfold while you are at that location - or somewhere on the way. Do you need a special plan to handle this possibility? Can you get back home easily? Do you need water, food, money, or clothes to make that trip? How likely is it that you would be hurt or stranded somewhere?

to inventory what I have, I’m amazed, feel a bit better. Some things on this list I dont have much of, but others, I have lots of. I usually buy both krusteez and bisquick. you can use them for other things like chicken pot pie in your cast iron dutch oven, or make a cobbler, and use canned veggies, and canned fruits. now im off to trim lettuce, and asparagus in the garden before they go to seed.
Business for Hardened Structures, an engineering firm based in Virginia Beach, is up roughly 40% since 2005, co-owner Brian Camden says. Some of his clients buy gold and silver and other precious metals as a hedge against a possible collapse of the currency, and they want to be able to protect it and their families, he says. So his company designs ways to build underground bunkers, strengthen walls and improve security systems on homes.
In the end, it’s a good thing to have multiple tools or ways to accomplish something. Most preppers take a “two is one, one is none” approach with backups and redundancies. Following this guide is an efficient way to have those backups. Rather than having three med kits in your basement collecting dust, each one is serving a purpose at all times by being ready in your home, bug out bag, and get home bag.

What is your physical ability? Are you and your spouse able to lift a 50 gallon garbage can full, in case you have to move it? Not everybody can do it alone easily. I met a person who was physicaly strong, but she had days her hands couldn’t open anything because of a chronic sickness. Another one, very strong also, but his back was fragile sometimes.

Durable packaging: Can it hold up to abuse, floods from storms, etc. For example, the biggest danger during an earthquake is things falling. Since it’s easy to imagine storing supplies like this on the bottom shelf in a garage, consider how it would hold up to stuff falling on top of the container or flood water coming in. Or zombies… those sneaky zombies.

Tupperware: Sealable plastic bins have changed the world. If you are prepping food for your weekly meals, or transporting food to a friend’s house, plastic storage bins can get the job done. They are dirt cheap these days and are very easy to use. While they can leach, stain, and scratch, as long as you use it for short term storage as intended they are nearly unbeatable.

Kimberly – In an electrical power failure you probably have three days. If this is purely local outage then a generator is no problem. If it is a large event with scarce fuel available like hurricane Sandy, then that could be a problem without alt.fuel. If you only had 3 days you could yank meat out and cook it if you have non-electric cooking sources. I wouldn’t depend on more than 20 lbs of meat being useful after electricity failure. Is saving frozen meat beyond what you could cook immediately worth the expense of the generator, fuel, maintenance, etc. in a long term outage?
The conundrum of owning stock is that it serves as a hedge against inflation only in an otherwise viable economy. At the first sight of serious economic trouble, the premiums paid on corporate stocks take a nosedive and not recover for months or years; in a genuine downturn, the intrinsic value of many companies will also shrink. Since a downturn is probably the time when you will need your rainy-day money the most, it's important to play it safe. Putting somewhere around 30-40% of your emergency stash into the stock market may be a good call. Going all in is a very risky bet, since in an economic crisis, it's not rare to see stock indices plunge 50%.
If you own a house, especially in a region prone to earthquakes or tropical storms, you should probably have a sledgehammer, a chainsaw (with a charged battery or some fuel at hand), bolt cutters, and a pry bar. These heavy tools are essential for clearing debris and getting to whatever's underneath. Keep them far from your other supplies: if your primary stash gets pinned under other junk, you can use the tools to get it out. Don't store pry bars and similar equipment in plain sight; robbers often use found tools to force patio doors, to pop safes, or worse.
Water is truly the staff of life, without it, you will die in just a few days. Assume that for whatever reason, your taps won’t work – there is no water coming into your home. What else do you have? Do you have bottled water somewhere? Did you know there is about 50 gallons of water stored in your water heater? There’s also a few gallons in the tank of your toilet! If you have an outside water source – such as a lake, creek or storm drain – do you have a way to filter it? Your first goal with water should be to be able to provide your family with 2 weeks worth of water and a way to continue filtering found water after that. Here is a great place to start learning about water.
Lastly, this list is primarily for Sheltering in Place and the requirements/resources the average person would be able to lay their hands on. This doesn’t take more extreme climates into consideration but should still provide a base regardless of where you live. For other lists you can check out our Resources page. For something more specific to the Bug Out Bag checklist, click here. Also this list is going to be missing the specifics of the amounts because each family or individual is different. So without further ado, here we go.
These are people who believe a thousand-year-old prophecy is about to come true. People who believe most of their loved ones will be dead within a year. People who are preparing for the possibility of killing their neighbors, who presumably will become feral and desperate. People who just might buy 3D printers and extra fancy new UV handheld water purifiers to help ride out the collapse of civilization, but who are probably more likely to spend $10 on PDF downloads of guides with names like Urban Chicken Farming After the Dollar Collapses. These are people who expect they themselves may only have a year left on this planet.
After three days eating very little vegetable matter, I was thrilled to dig into Thrive Life’s Tuscan Quinoa Bowl, which included a ratatouille-like sauté combining asparagus, zucchini, and diced tomatoes. The cooking process felt kind of like a science experiment— you fry dehydrated garlic bits in oil, then pour in the dehydrated vegetables and seasoning along with a cup of water—but the result actually tasted like something I might cook at home, minus the strangely firm consistency of the vegetables. The following night, I prepared a Chicken Cranberry Pot Pie, rolling out the dough for the pastry, cooking the filling in a slow cooker, and carefully sealing the pie with the prongs of a fork.
“The answer is you probably could,” she said. Though research suggests it might cause a mild depletion of vitamin C and other antioxidant chemicals, she explained, freeze-drying fruits and vegetables doesn’t have any significant impact on their nutritional value; packaged as stand-alone ingredients, they can even make for a healthy alternative to more caloric snack foods.
In an end of the world situation, we won’t have to worry about too much salt or too much sugar. Our main concerns will be keeping warm, getting potable water and enough to eat. A steady diet of tuna fish, canned meats, pasta, bean and rice will quickly get old. You will be happy to have the sugary canned fruit which will add very necessary calories to your diet and provide energy. The high salt which is dangerous now will provide necessary salts when you have otherwise run out of salt for cooking. In addition, most of the prepared foods are prepared to appeal to our taste buds. Food companies spend big money on making “convenience”
For the United States, the switch to fiat money came relatively late, in 1971. To stop the dollar from plunging like a rock, the Nixon administration employed a clever trick: they ordered the freeze of wages and prices for the 90 days that immediately followed the move. People went on about their lives and paid the usual for eggs or milk - and by the time the freeze ended, they were accustomed to the idea that the "new", free-floating dollar is worth about the same as the old, gold-backed one. A robust economy and favorable geopolitics did the rest, and so far, the American adventure with fiat currency has been rather uneventful - perhaps except for the fact that the price of gold itself skyrocketed from $35 per troy ounce in 1971 to $850 in 1980 (or, from $210 to $2,500 in today's dollars).

Call ahead to the meat dept.of your store and ask them if they can hold suet or fat for you, what days they ate most likely to have it in inventory, and whether or not it has to be special ordered in the quantity you need. You can also ask for meat trimmings as that is the extra fat that gets cut off the cuts being packaged for the sales floor. There’s often a lot of meat attached to these, and you can get them cheap.

I am an engineer by day, but a prepper 24/7. I am an Air Force veteran that developed emergency and disaster plans as an emergency manager and responded to many attacks and accidents as a HAZMAT technician. I have been exposed to deadly chemical agents, responded to biological incidents, and dealt with natural disasters worldwide. Check out my full story here: Rusty's Story

In the United States, about one in three adults is obese - that is, are overweight to the point where the condition likely interferes with their health or their daily lives. And while many folks in the prepper community tend to grossly overstate the importance of tip-top physical fitness, there is no denying that obesity is a very real foe. For example, among low-BMI individuals, the incidence of diabetes hovers around 1-4%, but the same number skyrockets to 50-80% for obese folks. Many other, serious metabolic and cardiovascular diseases follow the same curve - and can make it very difficult for the affected families to cope even with fairly prosaic and short-lived emergencies.

Robert A. Johnson sees his peers’ talk of fleeing as the symptom of a deeper crisis. At fifty-nine, Johnson has tousled silver hair and a soft-spoken, avuncular composure. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and economics at M.I.T., got a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, and worked on Capitol Hill, before entering finance. He became a managing director at the hedge fund Soros Fund Management. In 2009, after the onset of the financial crisis, he was named head of a think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

15. Red Feather Butter – What can be better than canned cheese than canned butter! Red Feather Butter, coming all the way from New Zealand, is another must have for your storage needs with an equally long shelf life. Not powdered or freeze dried but real creamy butter made from pasteurized cream and salt. Butter & cooking go hand-in-hand, give it a try be sure to have some stocked.
So, here's your homework: make a list of all the major threats discussed in this guide, alongside with any other contingencies you worry about. For each and every one of them, draft a detailed, step-by-step preparedness and response plan that sounds right to you, and that you can see yourself actually putting into action. Don't obsess over getting all the details right; we'll try to refine your choices in section 4, and even then, it may take several iterations to settle on an approach you are really happy with. For now, simply list all the noteworthy dangers, jot down some initial answers to the following questions, and see where that takes you.

There are only 3 million preppers in the USA and I have met about 1500 of them. They are mostly fearful, confused and disorganized individuals who know nothing about organizing to protect their own best interests through collective efforts. They are a truncated version of typical White citizens who are ignorant of just how insane the US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, European Union, and Vatican really is. Do you agree with this appraisal?

You’ll obviously need to tailor your survival kit to the number of people who will depend upon it. If you are going out for a solo camping trip, you won’t need as many supplies as if you are heading out with an 8-person team. The number of people depending on the kit won’t affect some of the items in the kit, but it will affect others. For example, you’ll only need one fire starter, no matter how many people are in your party. By contrast, you’ll obviously need to adjust how many space blankets are included with the kit, depending on the size of the group.